


Cross Your Heart

by Flyting



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: AU, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kilgrave being Kilgrave, Mystery, Stalking, angry munchkin Jessica, awkward unrequited teenage crushes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-25
Updated: 2016-04-01
Packaged: 2018-05-16 03:39:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5812375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flyting/pseuds/Flyting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jessica Jones is hired to investigate an apparent suicide, she finds herself in the difficult situation of proving that her childhood best friend may be a murderer.</p><p>A darkish AU where Jessica and Kilgrave first met as children.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. AKA Alias

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to explore the relationship dynamics if Kilgrave were slightly less awful and had never personally victimized Jessica. It still didn't go well.

Most PI jobs were pretty straightforward. There were no car chases or secret government conspiracies. Not in real life. Because most people had fairly simple problems: money keeps going missing from my business. I think my husband might be cheating on me. My daughter hasn’t called and I keep finding charges on my emergency credit card from bars in Cabo.  
  
Nine out of ten jobs she could wrap up in five minutes of facebook stalking- sometimes before the client’s elevator had reached the lobby. The cashier is stealing from you. Of course he’s cheating. Your daughter ran off to Mexico for spring break with her new boyfriend.  
  
The rest was just digging around for proof.  
  
Nine times out of ten.  
  
Jessica noticed that the woman sitting across the desk from her was nervous. Twitchy. Well-manicured nails were fidgeting with her cuffs and the diamond tennis bracelet on one wrist. That was nothing new- most people who sat in that chair were nervous. Nobody hired a private investigator to figure out who had left cookies at their front door.  
  
“You’re going to think I’m crazy. Or a liar.” She said, with a self-deprecating little laugh. “Everyone else has.”  
  
Middle-aged, but the stiff way she held her eyes and mouth screamed ‘Botox’, and the ‘artfully’ chunky haircut made Jessica think upper-east side housewife. Those people didn’t come to someone like her unless they had a unique problem.   
  
“Try me,” Jessica says.  
  
The woman takes a folded-up newspaper clipping from her purse, closing it again with a neat little snap.   
  
“Last month, my husband walked off the balcony of our twenty-third-floor apartment.” She unfolded the paper and laid it flat on the desk between them. The byline read, ‘Investment Banker Suicide’.  
  
“Ouch,” Jessica winced at the mental image. Splat.   
  
She scans the short article, although it doesn’t tell her much she couldn’t have guessed from the header. Rich guy took a swan-dive off the balcony in the early hours of the morning. Caused a four-car accident when he hit the street below. No history of depression, no apparent motive, no sign of a struggle. Pretty straightforward.  
  
The woman gives her a tight-lipped smile. “The police ruled it a suicide. What else could they do?”  
  
“And you don’t think it was?”  
  
“I know it wasn’t.”  
  
“How?”  
  
“Because I was there.”  
  
Jessica’s eyes narrowed. “You saw him jump?”  
  
She closes her eyes. “Yes.” Opens them again quickly, like she didn’t like what she saw in the darkness behind her own eyelids. She composes herself quickly. These society women could be made of iron when they wanted to be.   
  
Jessica reminds herself to say, “I’m sorry,” because that’s what you’re supposed to say. “What was it you wanted me to do?” She asks slowly, handing back the newspaper clipping. Suicide was pretty open-and-shut. Unless there was money involved.  
  
“Lloyd’s insurance policy didn’t cover suicide.” She says bluntly.   
  
Jessica sort of hated always thinking the worst of people. Especially when they proved her right.  
  
“We have some money from investments, savings, but with the lawsuits from the accident…” she trails off. “I need that insurance money. Now, Jerri Hogarth says you’re very good at what you do, Miss Jones. Whatever your usual fee is, I will double it if you can find proof that my husband’s death was not a suicide.”  
  
Her greedy little heart practically skips a beat. She forces it to slow down, not to jump the gun.  
  
“Before I can agree to take your case,” she says, as much to herself as to the woman. “I need to know what you think happened to your husband. If he didn’t kill himself.”  
  
That tight-lipped smile returns. A mask of self-deprecating amusement hiding the guarded hurt of someone who’s been laughed at too many times before for whatever they’re about to say.  
  
“Lloyd walked right off that balcony. Just strolled out, like he was going for his morning run. But it wasn’t suicide. He did it because the man in our house told him to.”  
  
Something prickles in the back of Jessica’s mind. She had a sixth sense for when the shit was being loaded in front of the fan.  
  
“The man in your house?” She prompts, as neutrally as possible.  
  
“I don’t know who he was. He never told us his name …isn’t that funny?” Neither of them laugh. “He just showed up at the door one night and Lloyd said he was going to be staying with us for a while- at the time it didn’t bother me, but now…”  
  
Shit. Shit shit shit-  
  
“And he told your husband to jump off the balcony?”  
  
“He told him to go for a walk.” She says flatly. “Then he pointed at the balcony doors and said, ‘That way.’ And Lloyd just-”  
  
I’m going to fucking kill him, Jessica thinks. Stupid lying son-of-a-bitch. _‘No I think I’m staying in Rome this year’_ her ass. He promised her. He _promised-_  
  
It had been a child’s promise, back when they were both still young and stupid enough for things like that to _matter._

Cross your heart and hope to die.

Somehow, that makes it hurt even more.  
  
The woman was still talking. “…I think my husband was drugged. That’s the only thing I can think of- Lloyd was a happy man. He would never have killed himself.”  
  
“Yeah, I’m sure- tell me, er…“ she trails off, suddenly realizing she had never even bothered to get the woman’s name. Crack private investigator she was.  
  
“Caroline Danvers.”  
  
“Right. Caroline, what did K- what did this guy look like? Can you describe him?”  
  
There was still a chance it wasn’t him, right? Maybe Lloyd pissed off his drug dealer. Maybe there was another dickhead with mind control powers out there. There were more of their kind every day.  
  
_You've got to promise you won't do this again, Kevin. Promise._  
  
“Tall? Sort of skinny. Nice suit. He had an English accent.”  
  
That settled it. Jessica was going to fucking kill him.


	2. AKA I'll show you mine if you show me yours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tweaked their ages just a bit to make this more realistic, since show!Kilgrave has a good ten years on Jessica, but it shouldn't affect much.

_May, 1997_

“Hey sweet thing, where you going?”

Jessica hitched her denim backpack higher, rolling her eyes. If there was one thing she was learning to hate about the city, it was men who treated a girl out by herself like a walking invitation.  
  
“Hey sweet thing, I’m talking to you!”  
  
“And I’m ignoring you! Maybe you should take a hint,” she calls back over her shoulder. Asshole.

From somewhere behind, she hears men laughing.

Jessica cuts into an alley, leaving the guys behind on the main road.

There was a Christian youth shelter four blocks over that might not be full for the night yet. It smelled like old sandwiches and pee, but at least it was clean. If she hopped a couple of fences she could get there before dark. If not… it was starting to look like it was back to the park and hope nobody had moved in on her usual spot.

Another glamorous night in the life of Jessica Jones.

Hard to believe that a year ago the only things she had to worry about were her C-average in English and convincing her parents to drive her to the movies on Friday night, she thinks bitterly.

The thought of her parents still stings; even the little, everyday memories feel like they're wrapped up in broken glass. The opening theme to her brother’s favorite tv show. Her dad hassling her about her grades. The smell of her mother’s hairspray. She tries not to think about them. Luckily for her, living on the street gave her plenty of other things to think about instead. Things like ‘where am I going to sleep tonight’ and ‘what am I going to eat’.

She’d been sleeping rough for four months now.

She eyes the chain-link fence at the end of the alley. Ten feet, maybe. With loops of rusted barbed-wire waiting at the top for anyone stupid enough to try and climb over it.

Luckily, she hadn’t been planning on _climbing_ the fence.

Just as she’s dropping into a crouch, preparing to jump, there’s a muted crash from behind her. An empty bottle skitters across cement.

“I think you owe me an apology, sweet thing," a man's voice slurs.

She turns around, groaning. Well, it wasn’t her old friend Asshole. And, lucky her, he’d brought his friends, Chubby and Twitchy.

Jessica takes a couple of casual steps back as they approach, trying not to let it look too much like a retreat.

“An apology?” she says, “Okay- _I’m sorry_ you were dropped on your head as a kid and don’t know how to take a hint.”

Asshole grins, showing off his unfamiliarity with the words ‘dental hygiene’. “Now, why you gonna say a thing like that in front of my boys? I’m just trying to pay you a compliment, beautiful.”

“Great, thanks,” she says sarcastically, when another step back would put her right up against the fence. “Have a good night.”

They stop less than an arm’s length from her, crowding her up against the chain link. Jessica watches them, eyes narrowed, waiting for the first move.

“Oh I’m gonna have a good night.” Asshole says, looking her up and down. Her lip curls. _Gross._

“You’re finally going to discover mouthwash?”

Twitchy snickers.

Screw it, she’s sick of waiting. Before any of them can move, Jessica cocks back her arm and delivers a startlingly solid punch to Twitchy’s gut that knocks him right off his feet.

Suddenly, hands are grabbing at her hair, her backpack, dragging her towards the dirty ground. She shrugs the bag off, lashing out at any part of them she can reach with a shrill snarl. Chubby’s hand closes over her arm. She drives her elbow back into his face hard enough to hear his teeth shatter.

“-the fuck?“ Asshole says. Chubby retreats back down the alley, screaming. It sounds thick and wet from all the blood in his mouth.

She drives her boot into Twitchy while he’s still on the ground, just to make sure he stays there, and then turns back to Asshole. Then she fists both hands in the front of his jacket and _lifts._

“Now I think you owe _me_ an apology,” Jessica grates out.

“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry miss!” he babbles. His feet scrabble on the cement, toes just barely touching the ground.

“ _Did you know_ _I could snap your neck like a twig right now?_ ” She growls. It started as an empty threat- just to scare him- but she realizes it’s true as she says it. There was nothing stopping her, and he sure as hell deserved it.  
  
“Please! I’m sorry!” the guy lets out a pathetic little sob.

She chucks him, one handed, against the chain-link fence.

“Buy a damn toothbrush,” she growls as he half crawls, half-runs for the street, dragging Twitchy with him. She cracks her knuckles and cranes her neck a little, stretching it. Her bones always ached when she did things like that- _super things_ a voice in her head whispered. It reminded her of being little and having growing pains.

Overhead, a streetlight blinks on, chasing away the shadows that had slowly crept up the alley. Somewhere in the scuffle, the sun had gone down.

Jessica sighs. The doors at the youth shelter locked at sunset.

Shit.

“How did you do that?”

Her head whips up. She pushes strands of dirty hair out of her face, shoving it back behind her ears.

There’s a skinny boy in a dark zip-up jacket standing at the mouth of the alley, watching her.

“Do what?” Jessica says. “I-I didn’t do anything.”

It’s a long time before he responds, and when he does his voice is flat and dull, like an actor reading from a particularly boring script.

“I saw you pick that man up.”

Jessica’s stomach does a somersault.

“You didn’t see anything,” she grinds out. Visions of police and scientists flick through her head. Herself in a big glass cage, like a big fish tank, that says ‘The Amazing Super Girl’ on the outside. Being poked and prodded by men in white coats until she died. “Got it?”

The boy cocks his head at her. He’s about her own age, she realizes. Maybe even a few years younger.  “Is that a threat?”

“Does it need to be?” Jessica realizes her hands have curled into fists by her sides. That seemed to happen a lot lately.

Another long pause. “I’m not going to tell anyone.” He says in that same halting voice. “I just want to know how you did it.”

He has an accent. English, maybe. Coupled with that soulless robot voice there’s something kinda creepy about him. Weirdo.

Jessica grits her teeth, sheer pig-headed stubbornness kicking in. Her mom always said _\- used to say_ \- that she’s argue with you if you told her the sky was blue. “You’re crazy. I _didn’t do anything_. Now go-”

“Yes, you did! Now _tell me,”_ he blurts out, hotly, sounding like a human being for the first time.

Startled, the words fall out of her mouth in a rush. “I- I don’t know how I did it. It’s… just something I can do. I’m just strong. Really strong.”

“Like a superpower?”  
  
Jessica shrugs. “I guess.”

Instead of running away or screaming, the boy scratches his nose, suddenly very interested in his shoes. “Sorry,” he mumbles.  
  
“For what?” she asks, confused.

“Just… sorry.”  
  
“Whatever,” she rolls her eyes, brushing the dirt and gross street crud off of her knees. Let him go and blab to all the kids at school that he saw a homeless girl beat up three grown men. Like anyone would believe him.

Her backpack had somehow ended up twenty feet away in a puddle and half trampled in the scuffle. “Great,” she sighs, shaking it off. She had half a sandwich in there. It was probably all gross now.

“Do you live around here?”

It was the boy again.

“Go away,” Jessica says over her shoulder. She unzips her bag and digs around, checking for anything broken.  
  
“I’ve seen you in this neighborhood before.”  
  
“What part of ‘go away’ don’t you get?”

A long silence. She starts to hope that he might actually have left.

“Do you want to see what I can do?”

Something about that hopeful, eager tone makes her pause, eyeing him in the dim light of the streetlamp. He’s rocking back and forth on the heels of his shoes, dark eyes peering at her optimistically through a curtain of floppy brown hair.

“What can you do?”  
  
He shakes his head, smirking like he’s got a big secret he’s just bursting to tell.

“Okay, fine, I'll bite. Show me.” She sighs. Not like she has anything better to do.

He leads her down two blocks and across the street to a twenty-four-hour market.

The bell dings as he opens the door, holding it for her like they’re on a date. Jessica rolls her eyes.

The guy behind the counter gives her a stink eye over his magazine as she walks in. They’re the only ones there.

“Is there anything here you'd like to get?” The boy says quietly.

“I’ve got, like, four dollars.”  
  
“Trust me,” he says with that sly little smirk.

For some reason, she does.

Jessica heads for the back wall and grabs one of the giant two-liter bottled sodas out of the cooler. On second thought she grabs two. And a bottled water. God, she missed bottled water. You could say that tap water was exactly the same all you wanted, it was a damn lie. Something about bottled water just tasted better. Maybe it was just the taste of disposable income.

The boy shadows her like a smug ghost, plucking an orange juice out of the cooler for himself and following her back up the aisle towards the checkout.  
  
“Anything else?” he asks.

Shrugging, Jessica grabs one of the big bags of chips too. And a thing of pop tarts- apple cinnamon.

“Is there a point to this?” she whispers. “Because if you just brought me here to grab-and-dash I could have done that myself.”

She can feel the cashier’s heavy eyes on them.

The boy just smiles.

Jessica follows him up to the front, juggling her armful of snacks. She unloads them onto the chipped Formica counter. He sets his lone little juice next to her small mountain of stuff.

“Sixteen eighty-nine.” The cashier mumbles, still watching them like he’s ready to vault over the counter and chase them any minute now.

“You want to let us have these,” the boy says to him. “No charge. You don’t mind.”

The cashier blinks at him a few times. “… no, I don’t mind. Go ahead, take them,” he says, in accented English.

Jessica pauses for a second while her universe rearranges itself. “What, seriously? Do you know him or something?”

“Never met him before in my life,” the cashier says, sticking her sodas in a bag. “Here you go.”

She takes the bag off the counter. “Thanks,” she mumbles, following the boy out the door and down the street.  
  
"Come again," the cashier calls after them as the door swings shut.

They walk side-by-side down the street in silence. He twists the top off of his juice. Takes a sip and scrunches up his face, frowning at the plastic bottle like it's personally offended him.

“How did you do that?” Jessica says when her mouth final catches up with her brain.

He shrugs, with his whole face and body.  “People do what I tell them.”  
  
"What, like you're Obi Wan Kenobi?" she scoffs.  
  
"But cooler," he smirks.  
  
They walk. Jessica swings the bag of snacks in her hand, thoughtfully.

“Does it work on everyone?”  
  
“So far.” He takes another reluctant drink. “I’ve never met anyone else like me before.”

“What do you mean ‘like you’?”  
  
“Anyone else with… powers.”

She can feel the weight on the last word. _Powers_.

Like being able to lift someone twice your size up over your head with one hand. Or jump right over a ten foot fence.

Jessica shifts uncomfortably, passing the plastic bag from hand to hand.  
  
“I’m Jessica,” she says. “Jessica Jones.”  
  
The boy hesitates.  
  
“My name’s Kevin,” he says.


	3. AKA Kilgrave

Jessica’s job would be a lot easier if she had all her suspects already saved on her phone contacts list.  
  
She scrolls to the one that says _Murdercorpse McDeathface._ It was a stupid joke between them, from a night conversation that she had probably been drunk for. She scrolls back through it.  
  
  
_Jessica 2:06am Kilgrave? Fucking ‘Kilgrave’? You’re seriously still using that stupid name? Are you actually 14?_  
  
Kevin 2:07am Only for my professional contacts.

 _Kevin 2:07am It’s not that bad._  
  
Jessica 2:08am It’s pretty bad. You’re such a loser. What was ‘murdercorpse’ already taken?  
  
_Kevin 2:09am Those are not remotely the same thing. You’re just jealous. Don’t lie._  
  
_Jessica 2:09am Whatever, Murdercorpse._

Suddenly, the name makes her uneasy. She hits the ‘edit’ button and changes it back to ‘Kevin’.  
  
_You busy?_ She taps out on her phone. Mrs. Danvers has left, and she slouches down in her desk chair, spinning it around slowly.  
  
Her phone buzzes a few seconds later.  
  
_Not for you_.  
  
_How’s Rome_? She asks. You stupid smugface lying son-of-a-bitch.  
  
She doesn’t send that last part.  
  
A sad, sick part of her is hoping for an outright lie. For something that she can catch him out in, triumphant and vindicated. Something that will prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her suspicions are right. Just one lie. One excuse to weasel out of any feelings of guilt or obligation.  
  
Jessica hates herself sometimes.  
  
_Gorgeous when I left. Had to pop back to the city for business._  
  
Jessica squints at her phone. Rereads the message several times.  
  
_So you’re in New York?  
_  
She is almost offended that he didn’t lie. How’s that for friendship?  
  
_Just for a few weeks. We should grab coffee sometime._  
  
And it was time for that bullshit between them already. Well, she knew her lines.  
  
Every time he was in the city he said that they should meet up. And every time Jessica agreed that they should and left it at that.  
  
Face-to-face meetings were hard, in some skin-crawling indefinable way. It was breaking an unspoken promise between them. Exposing an old, scabbed over wound to be picked at. Phone calls and emails and stupid texts at 2am were easier, and not just for her. At least over the phone he could talk to her without either of them having to worry what the wrong word would do.  
  
Try finding a support group for that kind of problem.  
  
The last time she’d seen him, really seen him and not just a picture of him smiling on some beach somewhere, had been a lifetime ago. His image is frozen that way in her mind - perpetually a pale, skinny teenager, sitting on the floor in the back room of a house that smelled like old blood.  
  
The thought brings Caroline Danvers crashing back to the front of her mind, like a body hitting the sidewalk.

 _We should, definitely,_ she texts back. An idea is wiggling around in the back of her mind. She has a job to do, she reminds herself. A very well-paying job. Feelings are only going to get in the way.

* * *

  
  
“So what all can you make people do?”  
  
“Anything I want.”  
  
“Oh, yeah? Prove it.” she says, the challenge falling out of her mouth easy as breathing. She stands up, leaving her bag of chips on the cement, and dusts salt off her hands onto her jeans. “Make me do something.”  
  
She had lead them to an empty warehouse near the river. It was one of Jessica’s favorite places to hang out. The thick metal lock on the side door had snapped off easily in her hand.

He peers up at her through a curtain of hair, squinting like she’s a difficult puzzle he’s trying to figure out.  
  
“Why?” he says finally.  
  
She shrugs. “Bet you can’t.”  
  
“I _can_ , I just don’t _want to-“_  
  
“Come on, don’t be chickenshit.” Jessica bounces on her toes. “Make me do something.”  
  
“I’m not-“ he flinches back, insulted  
  
Jessica makes a clucking sound.  
  
“ _Stop it.”_  
  
The clucking stops. She grins.  
  
Kevin glares at her a little, like he feels tricked. One hand picks idly at a spot on the rubber of his shoe. “Jump up and down,” he says finally.  
  
It wasn’t really how she would have imagined it, if you’d asked her before tonight to imagine what being mind-controlled would feel like. It wasn’t just doing things and not being able to control them. He said ‘jump’ and suddenly jumping just sounded like the best idea in the world. Jumping was awesome. She couldn’t stand to _not_ jump. She adds a little skip into her jumping- one foot then the other, putting just a bit of muscle into it, enough to push herself a few feet in the air with each hop- her own idea.  
  
“Incredible,” he mumbles.  
  
“This is so cool,” she says, grinning.  
  
He blinks at her. “Really? You think so?”  
  
“Yeah. I mean, it’s creepy, but it’s still cool. Can I stop now? Do you have to tell me to stop?”  
  
“You can stop,” he says quickly. Jessica stands there, panting just a little from the exertion. After a long moment, he adds, “That’s not what people usually say.”  
  
“People are stupid,” Jessica says sourly, dropping back to the cement floor beside him and offering him a chip.  


* * *

  
  
It’s a minute before she picks him out of the crowd of under-caffeinated businessmen and confused tourists. Jessica hates herself a little extra when she realizes it’s because she’s looking for a gangly teenage boy instead of a grown man. When she does finally find him, sitting in the corner with a laptop propped up in front of him, her first irrational thought is, ‘well that’s completely unfair’.  
  
No one who was that awkward and ungainly as a kid had a right to turn out that good-looking.  
  
He had filled out a little bit and there were the beginnings of lines around his eyes, but it was definitely him- the stupid pointy nose, the mess of fluffy brown hair, the chin. He even still dressed like a maître d’ at a smug art district restaurant. Seriously, what straight man wears mauve?  
  
If any part of her was still in doubt, the man she’s watching leans over and says something to the three teenage girls at the table next to him, who were shrieking with laughter over something one of them had on her phone. They stop laughing like a switch was flipped and practically trample each other in a rush for the door.  
  
Great.

Better to just do it quick, she thinks. Like a bandaid.  
  
Before she can have time to think about the stupid thing she’s doing, Jessica picks her way through a sea of little tables and plops down in the empty chair across from him.  
  
He frowns at her, mouth falling open to tell her to fuck off. Then he pauses.  
  
“…Jessica?”  
  
“Hey, Kevin.” She gives a little wave.  
  
The next thing she knows she’s being pulled into a tight hug, his hands flat against her back. “Oh my god, Jessica.”   
  
“This is a first. You at a loss for words?” she says into his chest, arms instinctively stiff against her sides. But she gives in, wrapping her arms around his middle, burying her nose in the front of his shirt. He smells different now. Different soap, clean clothes, but something about it still pings that little part of her that always thinks of ‘home’ as right here.  
  
God, this is why she didn’t want to do this. This was a bad idea. This was such a bad idea.  
  
When the hug goes on for just a bit too long, she blurts out the first thing that comes to mind. “You’re tall. When did you get so tall?”  
  
“I’ve always been tall. S’not my fault you’re too mean to grow,” he mumbles into her hair.  
  
It’s like a reflex to give him a quick jab in the side in response. The impulse just goes straight from her ears to her fist, bypassing her brain entirely.   
  
“Ow,” he says, somewhere between a laugh and a whine.  
  
Jessica pushes him away, her palms flat on his chest. She doesn’t miss the way one hand lingers at her back until she sits down again.  
  
“I can’t believe you actually came. God, Jess, it’s been-“ The words tumble out in breathy rush before he catches himself and presses his lips together in a thin line. She can practically see the mental switch being flipped as he remembers to watch what he says.  
  
It gives her an awkward little pang that might have been sympathy. Jessica knows what it’s like to not be able to give yourself the luxury of just letting go.  
  
“Fifteen?” she offers.  
  
“-fifteen years, yeah.” He’s staring at her, all dark eyes behind a curtain of brown hair, like he can’t really believe she’s there- like he thinks she’s going to vanish if he takes his eyes off her for a second.  
  
He knew her too well. The thought was tempting.  
  
“How have you been?” he asks.  
  
“You mean since we talked this morning?”  
  
“No, that’s not what I mean.”  
  
It’s like riding a bicycle, falling back into the familiar rhythm of random stretches of silence between responses. Talking to Kevin was like talking to someone through one of those phone translator services. There were awkward little pauses while he scanned ahead for any accidental commands in what he was about to say and mentally rephrased. It was a pain in the ass, but she appreciated that he tried. At least, when he was talking to her. She didn’t imagine he bothered for most people.

“Good,” she says. “Fine. Got a new apartment.”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Yeah, the landlord and I kind of had a disagreement at my last place.”  
  
“Over what?” he aks, smiling at her like her stupid story was the most interesting thing in the world. Asshole.

“We had a difference of opinion. He thought he shouldn’t have to pay to fix my heat in the middle of January and I thought he should choke on a dick.”

Kevin laughs, easy and amused. Jessica always could tell him anything. He was the one person she knew, deep in her bones, would never think badly of her no matter what she did. He still sounds like a little boy when he laughs, “Where were you when I was negotiating with my contractor last month? God, I missed you.”  
  
“I missed you, too,” the words sneak out, surprising Jessica with how much she means them. She thinks of Lloyd Danvers, splattered all over 96th Street and hates herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't forgotten about this fic, it's just been relegated way to the backburner. 8( But here is a bit for anyone still reading.


End file.
